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A Mind at Play an Interview with Martin Gardner

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A Mind at Play an Interview with Martin Gardner A Mind at Play An Interview with Martin Gardner KENDRICK FRAZIER is mind is highly philosophical, at home with the most abstract concepts, yet his thinking and writ­ Hing crackle with clarity—lively, crisp, vivid. He achieved worldwide fame and respect for the three decades of his highly popular mathematical games column for Scientific American, yet he is not a mathematician. He is by every standard an eminent intellectual, yet he has no Ph.D. or academic position. He has a deep love of science and has written memorable science books (The Ambidextrous Universe and The Relativity Explosion, for instance), and yet he has devoted probably more time and effort to—and has been more effective than any thinker of the twentieth cen­ tury in—exposing pseudoscience and bogus science. He is considered a hard-nosed, blunt-speaking scourge of paranormalists and all who would deceive themselves or the public in the name of science, yet in person he is a gentle, soft-spoken, even shy man who likes nothing better than to stay in his home with his beloved wife Charlotte in 34 March/April 1998 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER Hendersonville, North Carolina, and write on his electric typewriter. His critics see him as serious, yet he has a playful mind, is often more amused than outraged by nonsense, and believes with Mencken that "one horselaugh is worth ten thousand syl­ logisms." He is deeply knowledgeable about conjuring and delights in learning new magic tricks. He retired from Scientific American more than fifteen years ago, but his output of books, articles, and reviews has, if anything, accelerated since then. (He's now written more than sixty books, and more are in the works.) His knowledge and interests span the sciences, philos­ ophy, mathematics, and religion, yet he professes no special standing as a Renaissance man. He has received major awards from scientific societies and praise from some of the nation's leading scholars ("One of the great intellects produced in this country in this century," says Douglas Hofstadter), some of whom forthrightly consider him an intellectual hero, yet he remains modest about his contributions. At eighty-three, Martin Gardner reigns supreme as the leading light of the modern skeptical movement. More than four and a half decades ago, in 1952, he wrote the first classic book on modern pseudoscientists and their views, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, and today it remains in print and widely available as a Dover paperback and is as relevant as ever. It has influenced and inspired generations of scientists, scholars, and nonscientists. He followed that up in 1981 with Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus. In an essay in the New York integrity started it all." Although Martin Gardner seldom trav­ Review of Books entitled "Quack Detector," Stephen Jay Gould els to CSICOP meetings, he remains, through his personal welcomed the book and said Martin Gardner "has become a contacts, insights, published writings, and voluminous corre­ priceless national resource," a writer "who can combine wit, spondence, a profound influence on CSICOP, modern skepti­ penetrating analysis, sharp prose, and sweet reason into an cism, and intellectual discourse broadly. expansive view that expunges nonsense without stifling innova­ He answered questions posed by SKEPTICAL INQUIRER tion, and that presents the excitement and humanity of science Editor Kendrick Frazier. in a positive way." After that, in the same genre, came The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher (1988), On the Wild Side (1992), and Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic: More Notes of a Fringe- SI: In your book of essays The Night Is Large: Collected Essays Watcher (1996). 1938-1995, you organized your lifelong intellectual interests into seven categories: physical science, social science, pseudoscience, The subtitles refer of course to his column "Notes of a mathematics, the arts, philosophy, and religion. Do they have Fringe-Watcher" (broadened from its original tide, "Notes of equal importance to you? How do you rank them in importance a Psi-Watcher"), which has graced the pages of the SKEPTICAL or interest—to you? to others? Do you see them as complementary INQUIRER every issue since Summer 1983- His first SI column, aspects of one coherent worldview, or are some separate? "Lessons of a Landmark PK Hoax," dealt with James Randi's Gardner: My main interests are philosophy and religion, then-just-revealed Project Alpha experiment, in which Randi with special emphasis on the philosophy of science. I majored planted two young magicians in a parapsychology laboratory in philosophy at the University of Chicago (class of 1936), to see if the lead investigator could detect their trickery. The having entered the freshman class as a Protestant fundamen­ three Gardner anthologies each consist of half 5/columns and talist from Tulsa. I quickly lost my entire faith in Christianity. half reviews and writings for other publications. It was a painful transition that I tried to cover in my semi- When the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of autobiographical novel The Flight of Peter Fromm (now a Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), publisher of the Prometheus Books paperback). I actually doubted the theory SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, was established in 1976, Martin of evolution, having been influenced by George McCready Gardner was one of its original founding fellows, and he has Price, a Seventh-day Advcntist creationist. A course in geology remained a member of its Executive Council and Editorial convinced me that Price was a crackpot. However, his flood Board ever since. When offered the opportunity fifteen years theory of fossils is ingenious enough so mat one has to know ago to write a regular column for SI, he quickly agreed. He some elementary geology in order to see where it is wrong. dedicated The New Age anthology to CSICOP's founder and Perhaps this aroused my interest in debunking pseudoscience. chairman: "To Paul Kurtz, a friend whose vision, courage, and After I returned from four years in the Navy as a yeoman, SKEPTICAL INQUIRER March/April 1998 35 I returned to Chicago and would have gone back to my former and cruel. Ditto for Spanish bullfighting. job in the university's press relations office had I not sold a In high school I was on die gymnastic team (specializing in humorous short story to Esquire. This was my first payment the horizontal bar), and I played lots of tennis. I would enjoy for anything I'd written. It persuaded me to see if I could sur­ tennis today except that I had cataract surgery early in life. vive as a freelancer, and for the next year or two I lived on Without eye lenses, one cannot continually alter one's focus, income from sales of fiction to Esquire. My second sale was a so there is no way to anticipate exacdy where the ball is as it story based on topology titled "The No-Sided Professor." It comes toward you. was my first effort at science fiction. SI: Do you wish you had pursued one field more, to the exclu­ While freelancing, I took a seminar (using GI bill funds) sion of the others? from the famous Viennese philosopher of science Rudolf Gardner: I'm glad I majored in philosophy, though had I Carnap. It was the most exciting course I ever took. Years later known I would be writing some day a column on math, I I persuaded Carnap to have the course tape-recorded by his would have taken some math courses. As it was, I took not a wife and to let me shape die recording into a book. Basic single math course. If you look over my Scientific American Books issued it under the title Philosophical Foundations of columns you will see that they get progressively more sophis­ Physics. The title was later changed to Introduction to the ticated as 1 began reading math books and learning more Philosophy of Science. All die ideas in the book are Carnap's, all about die subject. There is no better way to learn anything the wording mine. Dover recently reprinted it in paperback than to write about id with an afterword about how the book came about and my SI: You probably could have been either a philosopher or a memories of Carnap. During the writing of this book, I mathematician—which a lot of fans of your Scientific American exchanged many pleasant letters with Mrs. Carnap, but before recreational mathematics columns probably thought you were. die book was published, for reasons unknown to me, she killed Did you ever think about going into academia? herself by hanging. Gardner: Early on in college I decided I wanted to be a Carnap had a major influence on me. He persuaded me writer, not a teacher, and I have never regretted this decision. diat all metaphysical questions are "meaningless" in the sense It is the reason I took only one year of graduate work, and that they cannot be answered empirically or by reason. They never cared to go for a master's. can be defended only on emotive grounds. Carnap was an SI: Given your breadth and variety of interests, how would atheist, but I managed to retain my youthful theism in die you describe yourself— your professional field? form of what is called "fideism." I like to call it "theological Gardner: I think of myself as a journalist who writes mainly positivism," a play on Carnap's "logical positivism." about math and science, and a few other fields of interest. Shortly before he died, Carl Sagan wrote to say he had SI: I appreciate the becoming modesty, but I think you may be reread my Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener and was it fair to too self-effacing.
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